The European Union has rolled out new regulations requiring special labels on items produced by Jews in the West Bank. While EU officials insist that the labels are for purely informational purposes, they clearly serve the interests of boycotters and other supporters of the anti-Israel cause. Judith Bergman writes:

There is a perversity about the labeling/boycott issue that seems to be completely lost on most Europeans, despite the obvious associations that it raises with Nazi Germany’s measures against Jewish shopkeepers. Conceivably, this is because many Europeans abhor the reminder and prefer to cast Israelis as the “new Nazis.” . . .

Especially perverse is the timing of the labeling. At a time when Arabs in Israel are stabbing and shooting as many Jews as they can get their hands on, while Arab leaders incite . . . murder in the name of fighting the “occupation” and every other conceivable excuse, Europe chooses to support the attacks implicitly by giving credence to the lie that terror has a moral justification. In this way, Europeans are in fact encouraging and perpetuating the conflict, as they and the international community have been doing for decades now by consistently and one-sidedly condemning Israel, while egging the other side on in its pursuits by giving it the credible impression that it can do no wrong, no matter what.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.